My ‘Black Lives Matter’ Problem

I had lunch recently with a colleague of mine named Allan. He’s a retired professor who once taught at a university in New York and now teaches inside prisons. Allan was talking in despairing tones about America and wanted to know my thoughts on the matter. When I asked him to be more specific, he was taken aback at the idea that further clarification was needed. He couldn’t understand my failure to see the utter hopelessness of the society all around me.

Allan is 68 years old and a self-proclaimed Marxist. Both of his parents were surgeons from New York, and he attended private schools all his life. He graduated from Harvard and Princeton with degrees in philosophy and French literature. Although he and I are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I still enjoy the sharpness of Allan’s mind and his compassionate spirit; but I resist, as best as I can, his extreme pessimism. He believes mankind is going to be felled soon by an apocalyptic revolutionary blow, courtesy of the international working class. Until such time comes, however, he will remain in a state of despair about the United States.

“Jason, black men are being killed in this country,” he said.

“Oh, I know that,” I said. “They are being exterminated.” I went on: “We both live in Chicago, where they are being massacred on a weekly and daily basis, but who is killing them? Huh? Are white cops going in and slaughtering them? Are white people from the suburbs gunning them down? Is the military going in and killing these black men?”

“If the cops kill them,” he said, “what incentive do they have to obey the law and—?”

“Listen,” I told him, “the spate of killings of unarmed black men by police officers in recent years is tragic and a disgrace. It is, I believe, the work of a small minority of rogue police officers, or ordinary officers weighed down by a form of statistical reasoning—given the disproportionate homicide rates among black men—that breeds a pervasive fear of blacks among the general population. This is sad, and it is a blight against the humanity of all persons.”

With that concession in place, I continued: “However, against the heroic commitment of the entire police force in this country, and given the enormous contribution that police officers—black, white, and Hispanic—are making every day by going into black and Hispanic communities overrun by murderous street gangs and protecting the lives of innocent residents living in these tragic neighborhoods, we need to keep things in perspective here. Police officers, when all is said and done, overworked as they are, underpaid as they are, and given the poor public image that they suffer, are doing a good job of trying to protect black lives in the inner cities of this country, where thugs and hooligans think neighborhoods are either extensions of their living rooms, or their own private fiefdoms where they can do as they please.”

Allan shifted in his chair. He asked what I thought about racial profiling. Here, I agreed with him that the practice is unjust because it arbitrarily targets members of a law-abiding majority at any given time. Because law enforcement agents have a coercive monopoly on the use of force against virtually helpless citizens, profiling is a legally problematic affair that, given the broad discretionary powers of the officers who exercise it, can lead to disastrous consequences. But there is still some possibility for rationality in the exercise of racial profiling itself. That is, an officer who has made an error of judgment in singling out a person for suspicious activity based on race could revise his actions before stripping the person of his or her dignity. The act of profiling by police officers, while embarrassing and painful to an innocent person, is not irrevocably harmful.

I explained to Allan that there was a more deadly and insidious form of racial profiling that was taking place in our nation. Yet this profiling fails to provoke the righteous indignation of those who care for universal justice. I was speaking of the racial profiling done by blacks against other blacks, which manifests itself in black-on-black crime. Black men, in particular, target other black people as prey to be annihilated.

This form of racial profiling is worse than police racial profiling, and not because it is an in-group phenomenon. Rather, it’s because the deadly intent of its perpetrators leaves a trail of tragic, irrevocable consequences. It is neither white authority nor white apathy that so threatens the lives of so many black Americans. The average white person has not created policies or instituted systemic forms of oppression that force the hands of criminals on the streets.

When some black folks complain that white people don’t value black lives, I often ask: What exactly do you mean? In fact, too many black Americans are reluctant to hold other black people accountable for the horrific crimes they are committing against one another. Members of Black Lives Matter want white people to esteem black lives and value the humanity of black people when they themselves can’t condemn and express moral outrage at those who maim and kill black children in the course of gang warfare, senseless street violence, and drive-by shootings. Why do white people have a larger moral responsibility to care about black people than black people have to care about their own lives? And why are blacks in need of special white nurturance?

Compared with the recent spate of police killings of unarmed black men, black-on-black crime is tantamount to a national-security disaster. The moral hysteria raised by a few incidents of police brutality in the face of this larger national tragedy is reckless hyperbole. It hides from the nation a deep malaise at work in the psyche of some in the black community: a form of self-hatred that manifests itself in a homicidal rage not fundamentally against white people, but against other black people.

Allan, like others on the left, places the blame for this black self-hatred on so-called white privilege. In our lunch conversation, he veered into a case for reparations for blacks based on this privilege and the ways in which unfair discrimination against black Americans is sociologically responsible for what I consider pathologies in some black communities. In the end, we agreed to disagree, as we do on most things.

Our conversation, however, had left my mind racing with thoughts about the moral hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter. As I sat at my desk late that evening and looked out my window as the street grew dark, I thought about two other transgressive and unpardonable sins of the Black Lives Matter movement. The first has to do with its outrageous position on Israel; the second pertains to its immoral demands regarding the education of black Americans.

The leaders of Black Lives Matter have written a profoundly anti-Israel (and anti-American) manifesto in which they accuse Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid.” The manifesto endorses the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) movement and takes the view that the United States justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliances with Israel. This, according to Black Lives Matter, makes the U.S. complicit in a supposedly genocidal massacre of the Palestinian people.

As a staunch defender of Israel on moral grounds, I categorically condemn the moral ineptitude of the Black Lives Matter movement on this point. If there is a victim in the Middle East, it is the beleaguered state of Israel. The Jewish state is the only technologically advanced and democratic country in a region of illiberal, primitive, and human-rights-abusing nations that treat women worse than cattle and don’t know the meaning of religious reciprocity. Since its founding, Israel has fought marauders in the likes of the Jordanians, the Egyptians, and the Syrians. These parties have invaded Israel, threatened her right to exist, and tried to eliminate her and Jewry itself from the region. Israel’s enemies among the Palestinians have sought to do the same with the help of terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority. And the Palestinians have made an unprecedented demand in the history of warfare. Displaced by a war that their leaders started and lost, they claim a right to return to a territory they failed to conquer. While Arab Israelis serve in the Knesset side by side with Israeli Jews, Palestinians have elected governments whose charters have called for the annihilation of Jews and whose leaders portray Jews as pigs, vermin, and an evil to be eradicated.

Israel is the only country I know of that grants citizenship and land rights to its avowed enemies. What’s more, Israel offered a Palestinian state to both Yassir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas and was not only repeatedly turned down but repaid with the second intifada and the indiscriminate murder of Israeli citizens. Palestinian intransigence is forged in the conviction that no deal will be made so long as Jews—any Jews—occupy the land of Israel. In 2005, Israel unilaterally handed over its territory in Gaza to the terrorist government Hamas and was, and still is, rewarded by a daily showering of rockets into Israeli land.

With its accusations against Israeli Jews, Black Lives Matter suggests that in their support of Israel, such Jews are complicit in the unproven crimes of genocide and apartheid. We must remember that even amid the daily onslaughts of war and terror that Palestinians inflict on Jews, the Israelis, in a spirit of almost irrational altruism, take great pains to limit civilian casualties and to ensure that those caught in a war they did not personally initiate are spared as much harm as possible.

Black Lives Matter is not only being unjust toward Israel; its anti-Israel stance betrays Jews in America, to whom blacks in this country are enormously indebted. If there are any unsung heroes of the civil-rights movement, it is those Jews who played an enormous but largely unacknowledged role in the liberation of blacks from racial oppression. American Jews undertook monumental efforts to found and fund some of the most important civil-rights organizations in the U.S. These include the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1909, Henry Moscowitz joined W.E.B. Du Bois and other civil-rights leaders to create the NAACP. The vice chairman of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the Union for Reform Judaism), Kivie Kaplan, served as the national president of the NAACP from 1966 to 1975. Arnie Aronson worked with A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins to found the Leadership Conference. From 1910 to 1940, there were more than 2,000 primary and secondary schools and 20 black colleges (including Howard, Dillard, and Fisk Universities) established in whole or in part by contributions from Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. At the height of enrollment at the so-called Rosenwald schools, nearly 40 percent of Southern blacks were educated at one of these institutions. During the civil-rights movement, Jewish activists represented a disproportionate number of whites involved in the struggle for black emancipation. Jews made up half of the young people who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. Leaders of the Jewish Reform Movement were arrested with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964, after mounting a challenge to racial segregation in public accommodations. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were drafted in the conference room of the Religious Action Center (RAC) of Reform Judaism, under the aegis of the Leadership Conference, which for decades was in the RAC’s building.

The hard, cold, and unsentimental fact of the matter is that without Jewish financial backing and moral contributions, there may never have been a civil-rights movement. What I consider to be our country’s heroic Third Founding (the Second Founding being Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg), which culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Acts, would have at least been severely postponed.

Charged by God with a duty to repair the world and to remedy injustice wherever they find it, the Jews have maintained a civilization for more than 3,000 years. They carried their duty into the 20th century by playing a pivotal role in widening the pantheon of the human community in America. The Jews tweaked the moral consciences of their fellow Americans and entreated them to consider blacks and all persons of color as possessing dignity and moral worth equal to that of any other human being. The anti-Israeli platform of Black Lives Matters has understandably alienated some progressive Jews in America who had initially aligned themselves with the movement. And it has alienated this black American as well.

There is another morally irresponsible claim made by the Black Lives Matter movement—a claim that should offend any self-respecting black American citizen. I refer to the movement’s demand that the United States provide free college education to blacks. On what grounds is this organization making such a demand? Why free college education for blacks but not for poor whites or for Latino, Asian, or Native-American college students? What special sociopolitical conditions exist for blacks that do not hold for other ethnic or racial groups such that blacks deserve to be exempt from paying college tuition?

Could it be that the spokespersons for the movement are failing here to recognize another cultural pathology blacks face? I have in mind the problem of single-parent families—in which 70 percent of African-American children now live. This is a financially untenable situation for a massive swath of black America. And it is certainly an issue over which blacks have control. This crisis is not a consequence or inheritance of slavery or Jim Crow. Indeed the Jim Crow period saw significantly lower single-parent birth rates among blacks. The downward spiral of the black family, the marked absence of fathers, cannot be the responsibility of white Americans. Nor should white Americans ever be asked what they intend to do about that problem, as the problem is not theirs. What we have here is a widespread failure among black Americans to exercise free will in a judicious and wise manner—a failure to appreciate that free will comes with a moral obligation to be fiscally mature. The question that the Black Lives Matter movement should be addressing here is as follows: What do you intend to do about these problems and issues, which are endemic to your communities?

Realizing, of course, that not every single parent can afford to send her children to college, perhaps the movement is simply attempting to pass that responsibility on to society. This leads us to some significant philosophical questions: Are the procreative choices that we make in life the responsibility of others, or are they our own? Is it a form of child neglect to bring more children into the world than you can afford to support? When you have children, is it fair to expect your neighbors to bear the financial responsibility of raising them when they may have decided not to have any, or to have just one, or two, or just the exact number that their budget can accommodate over the course of a lifetime? If someone has sacrificed and planned his life carefully and has already incurred debt by sending his own children to school, by what moral right would anyone dare tell him that because of racial disparities he is obligated to finance the college education of someone else’s child?

Those on the far left will say that free college for blacks is a social good. I have heard this repeatedly, and I have often asked for clarification. By social good, people often mean “the public interest.” When asked to define the public interest, leftists tend to fumble and speak convolutedly about assorted moral conundrums. But society is nothing more than the sum of each individual. Therefore, any reference to the public good would logically first have to refer to the good that each individual person can do. How do we know what that good is? One of the glorious achievements of this country is that here we get to choose a conception of the good for ourselves. For some, it is having a family; for others, it is pursuing a career or devoting one’s life to a specialized hobby, service to others, traveling—you name it. There are as many conceptions of the good as there are persons to imagine them. And in the United States of America, the state has no business imposing its conception—or any conception—of the good on you or deciding a priori what your conception of the good is. It leaves you free to choose for yourself so long as you do not violate the individual rights of others. If a notion of the public good is foisted on you, it means that a group of people has decided that its interests and conception of the good should override your conscience. This is an act akin to tyranny, as it takes away your capacity to decide for yourself.

The cardinal sin of asking for anything for free in this life is that you abnegate your responsibility not just for maintaining your existence but, more important, for achieving your humanity. For we achieve our humanity in several ways. One is by exchanging goods and services with others. We affirm the worth of the other, and we respect the other by rewarding him or her for such services, and, in so doing, our agency is implicated in affirming our self-worth and dignity in the beautiful act of reciprocity. In reciprocity, there is a recognition of equality among us as individuals.

The demand for a free education, along with the demand for race-based reparations by Black Lives Matter and others, is symptomatic of another problem in race relations. There are those on the left who see self-reliance, initiative, and a commitment to one’s own life as, at best, hopelessly naive. This skepticism doesn’t apply to their own lives—oh, no, they have gotten where they are by the exercise of their own virtues. But the state apparatus and its system are so corrupt and stacked against blacks, they believe, that while the application of those virtues will always be possible for a Condoleezza Rice or a Colin Powell or an Oprah Winfrey, it’s not an option for most blacks in America. Such people see grit, honor, hard work, and self-reliance as “white” ideals that are being imposed on others. Those traits reinforce whiteness, in their minds, and there is a gnawing resentment of those blacks who wish to appropriate such virtues for themselves. They cease being black in the minds of some on the far left. A sizable number of well-meaning but, in the end, racist progressives need black people to be black. It’s the darndest thing, but an African colleague of mine, dressed in a formal Chanel suit, was met with disappointment by her department chair. Why, she was asked, didn’t she wear something more ethnic like an African dress, and how come she was losing her accent?

Some on the activist left heed the call of black dependence with glee because it places them in a permanent position of power as part of a managerial class lording it over a needy set of entitled subjects whose interests they represent. The neediness and dependence of their charges simply reinforce how independent, privileged, and powerful those in the managerial class are in relation to their socioeconomic inferiors.

Finally, when you demand anything for free, you are claiming a status of such impoverishment that you hold yourself up as an object of pity. But, unlike compassion and mercy, pity is not characteristically American. Pity denotes contemptuous sorrow for the misery or distress of another person. And the contempt one feels is linked to a moral vice the other harbors: an unwillingness to exercise one’s agency in the relief of that suffering. To present oneself as a lifelong socioeconomic supplicant is morally repugnant because it requires that one become an active participant in one’s own infantilization. It permits that one’s own agency be expropriated by others, and it requires the surrender of one’s capabilities.

Such ideas assume a malevolence about the American polis that is untenable and empirically false. It’s only natural, therefore, that many Americans reject this type of victimhood. No doors are closed forever to anyone in this great country of ours. If your ethos and character disposition are set for achievement, if your will is wedded to a resilience and tenacity, and you rid yourself of the idea that you are entitled to the financial earnings of other people, you will find a way to make it here. On the other hand, the kind of dependency that Black Lives Matter promotes lays the groundwork for personal failure.

My friend Allan would disagree angrily with all this. But I thank him just the same for helping me clarify my thoughts on Black Lives Matter, a movement that stands to set back the moral progress of our nation and the progress of American blacks. I’d also note that perhaps I don’t see hopelessness at every turn or find despair in every corner of America because I ignore those who preach helplessness where opportunity abounds. And I reject their nurturance of scapegoating and dependency. Israel is good. So, too, is America. And the achievements of both countries demonstrate, above all, the virtues of self-realization and persistence. ’Til we lunch again.

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Must-Reads from Magazine

Why won’t the child just listen? Why won’t she come to reason? Where did I do wrong with her?

Parents of difficult children have asked themselves such questions since time immemorial. For all of modern psychology’s advances, today’s parents are no more likely to have good answers than did their forebears a hundred or a thousand years ago. Indeed, modernity itself has compounded the ancient problem, by breaking taboos around honoring mother and father and spawning new reasons for children to rebel against parental order that would have been inconceivable under premodern conditions.

This tangle of themes is at the heart of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, perhaps the darkest and most acrid novel about parenting in all of American letters.

Roth, who died Tuesday at age 85, never had children. Yet he wrote perceptively and with great empathy for Seymour “the Swede” Levov, the novel’s protagonist, whose love for his daughter, Merry, knows no bounds and is utterly unrequited. Handsome, affable, responsible, and wealthy, the Swede does everything right by the standards of the midcentury American bourgeoisie. He manages a successful enterprise, procures a trophy wife, owns a tasteful estate in the Jersey suburbs, and fathers a girl who brings ruin to it all. There is a rage within Merry, which, as she grows older, explodes (quite literally) in political radicalism before she smothers her inner flames under Far-Eastern asceticism.

Why does Merry go wrong? What is the source of her rage? She isn’t as beautiful as her mother, Dawn, for starters. Dawn is vapid and cold, and she holds Merry as a judgment against her husband; their marriage is loveless. Then there is Merry’s severe stuttering, which speech therapy fails to alleviate for many years. The Swede’s love doesn’t suffice to overcome these natural disadvantages. Nor can the father’s love keep away the ferment and collective rage roiling America in the late 1960s: race riots, assassinations, all manner of sexual and cultural degradation. Merry is disordered because disorder is in the American air she breathes.

So it is that, five years after Merry commits a Weather Underground-style terrorist attack in the name of stopping the American war machine in Vietnam, the Swede finds Merry living in an almost animal-like state on the streets of Newark. Merry is now a fanatical Jainist, filthy and wafer-thin. Having committed bloody acts of terror, she has now adopted the opposite extreme–total pacifism, veganism–perhaps as a form of expiation. The father-daughter exchange that follows makes for excruciating reading for anyone who has ever loved a child:

“You’re not my daughter. You’re not Merry.”

“If you wish to believe that I am not, that may be just as well. It may be for the best.”

“Why don’t you ask me about your mother, Meredith? Should I ask you? Where was your mother born? What is her maiden name? What is her father’s name?

“I don’t want to talk about my mother.”

“Because you know nothing about her. Or about me. Or about the person you pretend to be. . . . Tell me why you’re pretending to be my daughter!”

“If I answer the questions, you will suffer even more. I don’t know how much suffering you want.”

Merry goes on to confess to having killed four innocents in multiple acts of terrorism. And she makes her confession, our narrator observes, “as innocently as she might once have told him, ‘I baked tollhouse cookies this afternoon.'”

Though set in the turbulent 1960s, American Pastoral has a striking contemporaneity. We, too, are living through an age of intense intergenerational conflict. Today’s aging Boomers are as mystified by the zeal for abstract justice and romantic politics among the young as Roth’s Swede is by Merry’s Marxist and Jainist turns. True, Millennials aren’t, for the most part, setting off bombs at post offices and police stations.

But they mob their professors, ruthlessly discipline and punish their peers online, and take up all manner of secular substitute religions, from mindfulness to “clean eating” to identity politics. They are hungry for order and solidarity and transcendence. Their parents, who only know how to fight battles of cultural and sexual liberation, are no more capable of nourishing that hunger than the feckless, well-intentioned, all-too-sensible Swede.

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Crowned the “free world’s best hope” in 2017 by Rolling Stone, Trudeau has, since then, cut his foreign policy chops: heavy on gender equality, feminism, environmentalism and relatively light on security and geopolitics. He fancies soft-lens moments when he can tear up on cue, fun parades, dress-up extravaganzas and breezy feel-good stuff, all of which is reflected in his photo-posturing and official statements. His election slogan, when running against PM Harper in the 2015 federal election, was to promote “sunny ways.”

This naïve cheer has yet to resonate in the Middle East and, in particular along the Israel-Gaza border. Since withdrawing from the Gaza Strip in 2006, Israel has watched the Dante-esque destruction of what was a robust economy. Under Hamas rule, the Strip has become a theocratic terrorist state. Significant sums of foreign cash donated to develop and support civilian infrastructure are diverted to build terror tunnels, pay terrorist salaries, and produce of all manner of weapons. Incitement to violence against Jews and Israelis is fierce, endemic, and unrestrained. And every so often, a full-blown war breaks out.

Perhaps unaware of the long, complex, tragic backstory, Trudeau blasted Israel in a statement issued on May 16: “Canada deplores and is gravely concerned by the violence in the Gaza Strip that has led to a tragic loss of life and injured countless people.”

He pulls no punches, focusing on one individual who was injured in both legs by Israeli sniper fire at the border: “We are appalled that Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Canadian citizen, is among the wounded–along with so many unarmed people, including civilians, members of the media, first responders, and children.” For a leader who crows about his strong, principle-based support for Israel this is quite the invective. What seems to have stoked his previously dormant ire is the fact that Dr. Loubani was injured by Israeli fire on Monday, May 14, which was a very busy day: the 70th anniversary of the declaration of the state of Israel; the official ceremony opening the American Embassy in Jerusalem; and “Naqba” or “Disaster” Day, commemorated each year by Palestinians.

Each Friday since March, Hamas has staged a “March of Return” at multiple locations along the border fence. Billed as a “peaceful protest,” crowds tend to swell to the tens of thousands following midday prayers, during which Imams fire up the men to annihilate the Zionist occupiers and restore Palestinian and Arab honor.

Hamas recruits protest participants onto buses waiting outside mosques, throwing in financial incentives for attending, hoping to draw women and children as “extras” in this macabre, serial event. Many of the men show up with knives, Molotov cocktails, wire cutters, and other weapons and incendiary devices. A recent innovation is fire kites, which are launched and intended to burn Israeli farmers’ fields, and do. Pyres of car tires are lit, creating a dense, black, toxic screen to provide cover for physical border breaches and confuse Israeli snipers.

These “peaceful” protesters boast openly about their violent intentions, parroting Hamas leaders who, aside from one or two brief cameos well back from the fence, tuck away in their fortified bunkers under Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and other safe havens in the Strip.

Hamas leaders have exhorted these “peaceful” protesters to tear down the border fence and then proceed to remove various bodily organs from Israelis they kill and eat them. They tell Gazans, and anyone paying attention, of their intention to foment chaos at the border. Ideally, the smoke and confusion would facilitate a goal they commend openly: the capture of one or more Israeli soldiers, and, if things go particularly well, perhaps a murderous romp in one of the many civilian villages within a few hundred meters of the border.

For those martyred in this jihad to murder Jews and destroy Israel, Hamas assures, there is an exalted place in Paradise.

Now, all this bluster may sound and seem “peaceful” to PM Trudeau, but it is quite the opposite. There have been multiple fence breaches by terrorists armed with more and less crude weapons. It isn’t necessary to have a tank to kill. Knives, meat cleavers and grenades do the trick, as Israelis know well. This is Hamas, for goodness sake. Read their Charter. Follow their “media.” It’s all there. Zero ambiguity. And they mean it.

Why, Trudeau must be asking, does the IDF not resort to less extreme measures? Live ammunition, he has surely been briefed, is a last resort. Tear gas. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Even leaflets, social media announcements and radio broadcasts warning people to stay well back from the border—all have been ineffective. And, for that, there is one reason: Hamas. Trudeau’s rage would more appropriately be directed at Hamas incitement, disregard for civilians and commitment to a hateful, murderous ideology.

And what about the “blockade” of Gaza, attributed solely to Israel? Reality check: Egypt enforces a much stricter blockade on the Strip, allowing almost nothing through. Israel, on the other hand, permits passage of truckloads of goods daily: medical supplies, food, even “dual use” materials like cement, gasoline and tires, which are more often than not taken for civilians and allocated to terrorist infrastructure.

Twice in recent weeks, “peaceful” protestors have torched the border checkpoint in Israel for the transfer of goods. It is destroyed.

The Gaza-Israel border is very hostile. Hamas has, in the last decade or so, dug 32 terror tunnels—complete with AC and internet wiring—with the sole intention of burrowing into Israel to launch murderous terror attacks. Jihad. This is not a nuanced struggle.

On this–all of this–Trudeau is silent.

Which brings us back to Dr. Loubani, the Canadian physician who has had at least one previous brush with misfortune in the region. During the protracted street violence in Egypt in 2013, following the coup in which General Sisi ousted Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi, Dr. Loubani was in Cairo with a film professor from Toronto, who was also a strident anti-Israel activist. En route to Gaza to volunteer in a hospital, the travelers took a travel pause in Cairo. One afternoon, as they tell it, they happened, coincidentally, upon a large, violent demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Hundreds of protesters were arrested and jailed, among them the two Canadians.

Friends and family of the Canadian duo launched a vigorous public relations campaign to draw attention to their plight and pressure the Canadian government to advocate with Egypt for their release. They went out for a walk, their advocates said, and were enjoying ice cream cones. Before they knew it, were surrounded by mayhem. Once there, they felt compelled to administer first aid to injured protesters.

As they languished in prison, however, the initial version gave way to a more complex story. It seems that Loubani and his friend had sophisticated camera and recording equipment with them. Not necessarily eyebrow-raising for a film professor. More unusual, however, would be that they thought to grab the pro gear when heading out for a jet-lagged stroll to get ice cream. (And then there’s the small matter of military dictatorships tending to be sensitive about having violent rallies photographed.)

However, the really interesting part is what Loubani arranged to have his father share with the media while he was still in Cairo’s notorious Tora prison: that they were also in possession of drones. Why? To ferry medical supplies to and from hospitals in Gaza, of course. That drone twist certainly piques one’s interest. There is only one use for drones in the Gaza Strip, and it is neither peaceful nor in any way related to humanitarian or hospital work.

On Monday, May 14, Naqba Day to Palestinians, Dr. Loubani says that he was standing near the border among a cluster of orange-vested medics during a lull in the chaos. He was wearing green scrubs from the Ontario hospital where he works. After being injured by Israeli sniper fire in both legs, Loubani asserted that he was likely targeted by Israeli snipers. (The IDF advises that it is investigating the incident but has no specific information at the moment.)

In light of this backdrop, Trudeau continued to blast Israel: “Reported use of excessive force and live ammunition is inexcusable. It is imperative we establish the facts of what is happening in Gaza. Canada calls for an immediate independent investigation to thoroughly examine the facts on the ground—including any incitement violence and the excessive use of force.”

What we do know is that 50 of the 62 individuals killed that day at the border clash by Israeli sniper were Hamas operatives. We also know that Hamas regularly uses UNRWA schools, hospitals, and clearly marked ambulances to ferry fighters and weapons around the Strip. This is supported by documentary evidence collected over the years. Trudeau’s fury would be more appropriately directed at Hamas for its unconscionable leadership, encouraging extreme terrorist violence, and ongoing incitement against Jews and Israel. Hamas is, after all, listed as a terror organization in Canada and elsewhere for good reason.

The backlash to Trudeau’s statement was strong and quick. He seems, perhaps unwittingly, to have stumbled onto a hornet’s nest and turned to two Jewish MPs to clean up his mess—Michael Levitt and Anthony Housefather, representing electoral ridings in Toronto and Montreal, respectively, with large Jewish populations. They issued a peculiar statement. While not directly critical of the prime minister, they unequivocally condemned and held Hamas responsible for the deaths and injuries at border clashes.

It seems that Trudeau tapped two rookie Liberal MPs, of a total of 184 in his caucus, to be the fig leaves for what seems to be a rather bifurcated and confusing policy on Israel. Some observers speculate that Trudeau hopes to use this clumsy doublespeak to allow him to be “correct,” depending on where and how the chips fall. By dereliction, the prime minister has signaled that the Israel-Gaza issue is a “Jewish” one, as opposed to one of the most important geopolitical crises in the world. Hamas, like Hizballah, Syria, the Houthis, is yet another Iranian proxy. It is disturbing that two Jewish MPs, representing “Jewish” ridings, are the only ones in the Trudeau government speaking out in support of Israel.

On social media, Mr. Housefather, in particular, refers to Canada’s consistent pattern of supporting Israel in UN votes as clear evidence of the prime minister’s true support. Whereas UN votes are important, surely, so are Trudeau’s public comments explaining his support for Israel. He tends to express himself in a sweeping, imprecise manner, oft-repeating distaste for the obsessive bullying of Israel in international forums. All of which is laudable. And he likes to say things about what good friends Canada and Israel are, but that even good friends can, sometimes, disagree.

Indeed, and those are likely the lines he trotted out when he spoke on the telephone with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu one day after his written thrashing of Israel following the Loubani incident. Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on the exchange, but Trudeau issued a short readout on the call, reporting that he had expressed “thanks for the consular assistance Israel is providing . . . reaffirmed Canada’s call for a neutral process to ascertain how the actions of all the parties concerned . . . contributed to the events of May 14, including the reported incitement by Hamas . . .” And that they “agreed on the importance of addressing the economic crisis in Gaza and jointly affirmed the close and abiding friendship between Canada and Israel.”

In other words, PM Trudeau did nothing to walk back his perfervid criticism of Israel other than to acknowledge, as a possibility, “reported incitement by Hamas.” As if there is any doubt. What Prime Minister Trudeau does not say, in this case, is far more important than what he does.

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It’s understandable that cynicism has become the default approach for average Americans navigating the political environment. Interpreting events as the product of a raw power contest rather than a clash between competing principles is not only simpler but often correct. Occasionally, though, a purely cynical understanding of how politicians conduct themselves can lead observers astray. Sneering pessimism alone would not have led anyone to conclude that bipartisanship would be breaking out in Washington in an election year. But, to a degree, it is.

In March, two-thirds of the U.S. Senate voted to repeal aspects of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill passed in the wake of the mortgage market’s collapse and the ensuing economic downturn. That bipartisan sentiment did not abate when the bill reached the House yesterday, where 258 members—hardly a party-line vote—approved the regulatory rollback measure. Predictably, progressive politicians allege that the vote was the culmination of a treacherous scheme hatched in backrooms between nefarious politicians and mustache-twirling special interests.

“Big banks have spent millions of dollars trying to roll back the rules we put in place after we bailed them out ten years ago,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote. “Today, they got what they paid for.” Rep. Keith Ellison called the vote indicative of America’s “full-on lurching towards plutocracy.” For Rep. Yvette Clarke, the rollback of Dodd-Frank regulations will facilitate “discrimination against African-Americans, Latinos, and other minority groups.” For Bernie Sanders, to whom everything looks like a nail, this was another indication that it was time to “break up the largest financial institutions.”

It is hard to square these hyperbolic reactions with the effects of this soon-to-be law. The bill reduces the number of large banks subject to onerous regulations imposed on them in 2010 and unburdens smaller banks with less than $250 billion in assets from complying with Dodd-Frank regulations. Progressive regulators have lamented the move as one designed only to improve the lots of America’s richest financiers, but this is a political message divorced from reality.

Critics of Dodd-Frank always noted that the risk to the foundations of the economy were not banks with relatively small assets but major institutions like JP Morgan Chase or Bank of America, which have well over $1 trillion in assets. It was the smaller community banks with $50 billion in assets and less that make up the vast majority of American financial institutions and once accounted for most small business loans. The balance has recently shifted in favor of big banks, though, as the regulatory environment has made it harder for smaller institutions to compete. Those institutions are the most burdened by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s compliance costs, reporting requirements, and lending restrictions.

“Dodd-Frank costs the banking system a staggering 83 million man-hours and $39 billion in compliance costs over its lifetime,” historian and COMMENTARY contributor John Steele Gordon wrote recently. Ironically, the only institutions that could easily absorb the costs of regulations favored by progressives like Warren are the institutions that were once deemed “too big to fail.” As Gordon noted, the effect of Dodd-Frank was to direct more assets into fewer hands and make the financial institutions the reformers said were already too big bigger still.

This victory for common sense didn’t just happen overnight. The bipartisan consensus around the notion that Dodd-Frank was a well-intentioned debacle was forged over the span of years. Conservatives have been making their case against the stifling regulatory mechanisms in Dodd-Frank for nearly a decade. They campaigned on the issue and pursued incremental legislative strategies designed to address the problems they enumerated. What’s more, all of this occurred in the plain sight. Progressives who write the rollback of their achievement off as the flowering of some kind of conspiracy are doing their supporters no favors. That is paranoia, not politics.

It’s not just conservatives who are celebrating a hard-won victory today. Yesterday, the GOP-dominated House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill aimed at improving the conditions in prison by a staggering 360 to 59 votes. The bill directs the Bureau of Prisons to increase access to and incentives to engage in inmate programs like education and vocational training, which reduce recidivism rates. If passed, the bill would also prohibit shackling pregnant inmates, provision feminine hygiene products, and limit the distance prisoners can be incarcerated to a maximum of 500 miles from their residences. The bill may not survive in the Senate as it is, but not because it goes too far. Rather, it doesn’t go far enough. Senate Judiciary Chairman and Republican Chuck Grassley told reporters that prison reform could not survive as is unless it includes broader sentencing reform.

Given Donald Trump’s tough-on-crime persona during the campaign and his choice for attorney general, few might have predicted at the start of the president’s term that Republicans would be charging ahead with a prison reform bill with Trump’s consent. Prison reform organizations are suspicious of the measure because it is not a comprehensive solution to the matter of over-incarceration, and the bill’s carve-outs for certain prisoners including immigrants raise civil libertarian eyebrows. But the bipartisan consensus about the necessity of criminal justice reform is bearing fruit, and those seeds were planted years ago by libertarian and progressive reformers. That consensus is also the product of years of labor by activists who refused to make the perfect the enemy of the good and who never scoffed at politics as the naïve preoccupation of the unenlightened.

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On a special edition of the COMMENTARY podcast, we discuss the life and legacy of Philip Roth, whose work we both admire and find wanting. Give a listen. Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes.